Sylvie
“I still can’t believe I didn’t wake you up.”
“Maybe you just sing like an angel,” he says, stretching in his seat. “Like an angel of sleep. Also I didn’t know Taylor Swift wrote folk music? For some reason in my head I had her as a pop artist.”
“It’s folklore!”
“Is that a word people use for folk music?”
“Oh man,” I say. “Oh man.”
“What?”
“I mean it obviously makes sense, but . . .”
“What?”
“You don’t know anything about pop music.”
“I don’t,” he allows.
“Which means, by definition, that you don’t know anything about Taylor Swift.”
A pause. “Sylvie. Why is this such a big deal?”
“folklore is Taylor Alison Swift’s eighth album.”
“She has eight? I thought she was a country singer.”
“Hold on, I need to pull through McDonald’s and get a really giant Diet Coke. Call it a preemptive strike.”
“For what?” he asks, genuinely confused.
“Knox, I need ENERGY for this conversation.”
A LITTLE LATER
“Wait, hold on, how does football play into this again?”
“Because Taylor Swift is the NFL!”
A LITTLE LATER
“And that’s why it says Taylor’s Version after the song title? Because she owns it?”
I turn up the first track of Speak Now. “She does. She owns this version of ‘Mine.’”
“One: that’s a great sentence. And two: good for her. I think you should be able to keep the things you make.”
I exhale. It is an exhale of deep satisfaction. “Me too.”
“I just have one question.”
“Fire at will.”
“You keep saying ‘Errors Tour.’ What’s an ‘Errors Tour’? Is she, like, referring to mistakes she’s made in her past? Like are the errors her ex-boyfriends, or . . . ?”
“I—”
“Sylvie? Are you okay?”
“I can’t—”
“Did Diet Coke just come out of your nose?”